“Motl son of the cantor” (Motl Peyse dem Khazns), by Sholem Aleichem, translated from Yiddish by Nadia Déhan-Rotschild and Evelyne Grumberg, L’Antilope, 282 p., €22, digital €16.
Flee Ukraine and persecution for a better life. More than a century before the current invasion of the country by Russia, this is the painful choice already made, in 1905, by the Yiddish-speaking writer Cholem Aleichem (1859-1916). Driven out, like hundreds of thousands of other Jews, by the waves of pogroms that were unleashed in the tsarist empire at the turn of the XXe century, he sailed for New York.
Rather than drawing a tragedy from it, the novelist and playwright, born in the kyiv region, treats this exile with the tender humor that characterizes him. It is through the eyes of Motl, a 5-year-old boy curious regarding everything, that he narrates this epic. The father of the child, Peyssi, cantor of the synagogue, having died following a long illness, his family finds itself in extreme destitution. At the instigation of Elyè, the eldest brother, she decides to leave her native village for America. Flanked by Pinyè, Elyè’s best friend, and their respective wives, the small group embarks on a long journey full of obstacles and twists and turns across Europe, which will take them to London, while waiting for the long-awaited crossing to the New World.
Yiddishland with earthiness
In this novel, his last, left unfinished at his death and today only translated into French, the author of the famous Tevyè the milkman (1894) – the origin of the film A fiddler on the roofby Norman Jewison (1971) – vividly brings Yiddishland to life at the end of the 19th centurye century, populated by colorful characters. Menashette, the healer’s wife, who greedily watches over the fruits of her lavish garden, Peysé, the warm neighbor, or even Yoyné, the rich baker, who goes bankrupt overnight following having financed his daughter’s wedding…
All draw an endearing microcosm that is already shaking up the upheavals of the world. Some, like Elyè, the eldest brother, try to earn a living by the most unusual means (a series of enterprises which will each end in a resounding fiasco), while others, such as Pinyè, his friend, the satirist and literate writer, feel ” cramped “, “strangled[s] » on this piece of land which leaves them with few prospects.
Diversity of the Jewish world
The incredible and perilous odyssey of the protagonists through the major cities of Europe (Vienna, Krakow, London), and in particular of Ukraine, also allows Sholem Aleichem to reveal all the diversity of the Jewish world of the time. In Brody, on the other side of the Russian-Austro-Hungarian border, crossed clandestinely, there are “Jews even more Jewish” with their long curls and their caftans, but speaking German and not Yiddish, which little Motl discovers. While in Lemberg (now Lviv), the “coquette”, he is surprised that the Jews can walk quietly during the Shabbat, in their traditional outfits. In Antwerp, finally, where he feels “like at [lui] », there are hundreds of other candidates for departure, fleeing anti-Semitic violence, whom he rubs shoulders with and who, like his family, seek the assistance of charitable associations to be able to leave Europe. Will they all make it? Nothing is less certain, because America imposes strict reception conditions.
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